Lee Oasis has had another highly productive year. Since April 2007, we have delivered 503 items of large furniture and baby equipment to 166 households. That translates as 119 beds and cots, 72 chests of drawers, 64 cookers and fridges and microwaves, 48 wardrobes, and almost as many again sofas, and tables and chairs.
Two thirds of those 166 households had children, which means we've helped something in the region of 500 people - most of them referred to us by health visitors and hostel officers and supported housing teams - and van runs are up to three a week.
On top of this, the drop-in volunteers processed three or four tonnes of clothes, bedding, towels, crockery, pans, and toys - which averages at between eight and ten bin bags and boxes of stuff each week, every week, to be sorted and checked and rehomed.
We've attracted three big new sponsors - the Hatcliffe Trust, the Merchant Taylors Company and the Church Urban Fund - and several very welcome smaller ones. Particular mention is due to the pupils, teachers and parents at Bonus Pastor College, who have made it possible for us to extend our help to single person households by raising money for 11 microwaves, so far.
But the year's biggest success was the replacement of the old van. We are very grateful to the Hatcliffe Trust and the Merchant Taylors Company for generous donations which have made it possible for us to replace the leaky, unreliable, insecure old van with a bright, shiny younger version. Both are big charities who do lots of good works in the borough and we are very proud and pleased to be included on their priority list.
The third big new sponsor was the Church Urban Fund, thanks to which Lee Oasis now has its own dedicated phone line and telephone number - 8857 0043, for your diaries. This means not only that calls to Lee Oasis will no longer clutter up Clare's private line, but more importantly that they can be diverted to anyone standing in for her, allowing the search for a proper deputy to begin in earnest. We are advertising among volunteer websites.
Other projects funded by the Church Urban Fund include money to pay for professional PAT testing of small electrical goods, so we can start giving out kettles, toasters and TVs again. This had been banned by our insurers. CUF also provides a small ‘social inclusion fund' - to pay expenses for people who want to volunteer and would be of great use to Lee Oasis, but who cannot afford the extra bus fares or whatever.
In short, three of the four projects on the to-do list at last year's AGM have actually been achieved.
The fourth was to find new source of funding for cookers and fridges following the closure of the Healthy Communities Fund. That, I regret to say is still work in progress.
Other work in progress includes:
Still with recruitment, we have opened talks with Lee Timebank about making Lee Oasis an organisational member - in the hope of roping in additional skills: such as how to sell donated collectables on eBay. So, if you're good at darning, or digging or double Dutch, please sign up and earn Lee Oasis some credits. If you see me after the meeting, I have contact numbers.
On a more serious note: the perennial problem of storage is reaching crisis point again. Three key supporters have had to withdraw their garage space and still nothing is forthcoming from the council. The departments that would benefit from giving Lee Oasis storage space - environment and social services - are not, of course, the departments that control the council's garage stock.
Over the next year we shall be focusing on four main projects:
To finish, I'd like remind the meeting of the family I told this AGM of last year, who had been in the hostel up the road for two and a half years, waiting to be rehoused. This year - although that family has happily been resettled - the record has gone up to three years, and there's a nursery-age child there now who was born at the hostel.
Working families with no specific medical or social requirements currently face anything up to a four year wait in a hostel for rehousing - even if they have priority band A status. And the bulk of admissions to the hostels are working families, many of them legal evictions from privately rented housing suddenly going up for sale.
Nominations for temporary housing are coming through faster, which allows people a stepping stone out of the hostels while they wait for permanent rehousing, but it makes more work for Lee Oasis. Families still only get seven days notice to move when an offer does come through, and that often does not leave enough time - let alone money - to find essential furnishings. This is where Lee Oasis comes in.
The hostel staff say they are very grateful for all our efforts. We stop the system "silting up".
Intro to new constitution:
To cut a long story short: two years ago the diocese of Southwark helped us redraft Lee Oasis's constitution to make the project eligible for a wider range of charitable grants. When we then applied to the Church Urban Fund for money, a new set of eyes decided they had mis-advised us. Meanwhile the laws on charitable registration had changed too. So, we had to do it again.
The nub of the problem was where the financial and legal responsibility for Lee Oasis lay. The drop-in had begun 14 years ago as a project of Churches Together in Lee - on £50 from an ecumenical Justice and Peace group, I'm told. But as it grew it had become more and more independent of CTL, setting up its own management committee and accounts. We were faced with three choices: either Lee Oasis was still a project and CTL accepted liability, or one of the six CTL member churches did - or Lee Oasis grew up, left home and registered in its own name.
Unfortunately, while Lee Oasis has grown stronger over the intervening years, CTL has not. The CTL committee did not feel it was in a position to oversee Lee Oasis's future, legally or financially. And the individual church ministers hesitated to accept such a long-term burden for their successors.
So really, there weren't three options at all. Only one. And here it is: a constitution enshrining Lee Oasis an independent community association with its own trustees.
It may look broadly the same as the constitution we passed two years ago, but this is a legal document based on a model approved by the Charity Commission and adjusted to Lee Oasis's particular structure by experienced advisers. It is the very best we can do to protect and perpetuate the relationship between Lee Oasis and Churches Together in Lee, which we value greatly. But room for tweaking is limited. I'm afraid the AGM must either pass it - or reject it and start again.
Starting again is not impossible. You could set it up as a church group - but the laws for them are also about to change, so that would further delay charitable registration - or you could set it up as one of the new "charitable incorporated associations" envisaged by the laws that came into force this year. However, even the Charity Commission hasn't quite figured out how that is going to work and documents that were to have been available from last January are still pending, with no date in view.
One final point: charitable registration takes up to four months. This approved version which the committee presents to the AGM today is supposed to ensure a fast-track. We would like to express our deep appreciation to Barbara Lowndes of the volunteer advisory body Community Matters for all her help over many weeks, guiding us through the maze.